Rushdie warns of new dangers to free speech in West

Free speech is certainly under assault. Free thought even is under assault. Every word is a potential slight. Even intonations now are subject to review. The tyranny of the Sensitivity Police is a real thing and it has spread to beyond the college campus and into newsrooms and beyond.

(From Yahoo News)

Violence against writers and a misplaced sense of political correctness pose new dangers to freedom of speech in the West, writer Salman Rushdie said on Tuesday.

Rushdie, the subject of an Iranian death threat in 1989 for his book “The Satanic Verses”, which was deemed blasphemous by many Muslims, said he had not expected freedom of expression to come under attack again to this extent in the western world.

“It seems to me the battle for free expression was won 100 years ago,” the 68-year-old told an audience at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, under heavy security.

“The fact that we have to go on fighting this battle is the result of a number of regrettable, more recent phenomena.”